S.F. Arts Library Embraces American Musicals Collection / Ex-professor's memorabilia of Broadway to head north

Bill Workman

Published
4:00 am PST, Thursday, December 23, 1999

1999-12-23 04:00:00 PDT REDWOOD CITY -- For 15 years, the Center for the American Musical, an extensive collection of old recordings, sheet music, books, playbills and other show business memorabilia, has been housed in a storage room at Redwood City's Canada College.

But the nonprofit center, the brainchild of Joe Marchi of San Mateo, a retired Canada professor who has been its unpaid executive director and entire staff all those years, has long since outgrown its cramped rent-free quarters.

"I can't even keep up with new donations to the collection, and I just don't have the time to catalog it all," said Marchi, 69.

Since his retirement five years ago, Marchi has increasingly devoted his time to the lecture circuit, giving colorful talks to Elderhostel and civic groups on the musical and its impact on American culture and the world, as well as writing reviews for local newspapers.

Now, he has found a new home at San Francisco's Performing Arts Library and Museum for the collection he began as a teenager in the 1940s with meager earnings from an after-school job at a Mission District laundry.

Sometime in January, moving trucks are expected to arrive at the campus to haul away, among other things, the 4,000 musical albums, CDs and tapes (from "Abyssinia" to "Zorba" and including nine versions of "Annie Get Your Gun"). Also being moved are the piles of sheet music that include 900 Irving Berlin pieces, hundreds of books, file cabinets crammed with old ticket stubs, original cast flyers, clippings, posters and other musical trivia, and the scrapbooks of reviews, magazine articles and world premiere programs from the 1890s to the 1920s that a Foster City donor found in his aunt's attic after she died.

Meanwhile, Marchi and the Performing Arts Library and Museum have submitted a $75,000 grant request to a San Francisco patron of the arts to help pay for the move and for the extensive archival work the library must undertake before its latest major acquisition can be made accessible to scholars and Broadway musical buffs.

"We're very excited about it," said Margaret Norton, the arts library's longtime director, who retires next month.

"Everyone is glad there are people around like Joe Marchi, who is willing to share his knowledge and love of the American musical," she said. "Without his kind of passion, we wouldn't have most of the collections the country now enjoys."

Marchi, a counselor for much of his long career in education, became enamored with Broadway musicals at the age of 15, when his cousin Dolly took him to see "Oklahoma" at San Francisco's Curran Theatre.

"I was just so thrilled by everything, the dancing, the singing, everything," said Marchi. He was soon buying every Broadway musical album he could afford.

"I remember it cost me $6 to buy my first album of five 78 rpm records of 'Oklahoma.' That was expensive for a job that paid 50 cents an hour."

His enthusiasm for musicals and the stories and personalities behind them prompted him in 1983 to volunteer to teach a one-unit elective course at Canada College that he called "How Did We Get to Oklahoma? (The American Musical -- 1865 to 1943)."

In it, he told how the Broadway musical evolved from burlesque and song-and-dance revues to what amounted to the radically new storytelling of Oklahoma on the musical stage.

"A lot of students thought it was going to be a snap course," he said. But they found out it was work, with quizzes, tests and special projects in which the professor sought to link musicals to the students' majors.

For example, said Marchi, one student who planned to be an elementary school teacher traced the origins of "The King and I" to Anna Leonowens, the real-life governess to the king's children who wrote a book in 1872 on her experiences, "Romance of the Harem."

Within a year, the course had become a full-blown program on the American musical that attracted a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and installation of his growing collection in Room 2G at the campus media center.

It was not long before Marchi, who did his undergraduate work in English at San Francisco State University, was hosting a radio show on the musical at KCSM and writing and producing tributes to composers Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and other greats of the musical theater for performances on campus and at Redwood City's restored Fox Theatre.

"Although it may be idealized at times, the musical is more a part of our voice to the rest of the world than anything we've ever done in American culture," said Marchi.

A gregarious, energetic man, he delights in showing off his vast knowledge of the successes and flops of the musical theater stretching back to the 19th century.

During a visit to Room 2G the other day, he randomly plucked an album, old playbill or sheet music from the stacks and recounted details from the lives of composers and performers and recited from memory the lyrics of a long-forgotten tune like "You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea," a paean to the relaxing powers of good Scotch.

"See this?" he said, pointing to a photograph in an ancient playbill. "That's Billie Burke, the first wife of Ziegfield. She played the good witch in 'Wizard of Oz,' remember?"

An old magazine ad for Lucky Strike cigarettes reminded him of a 1930s endorsement by Mae West that amused him. "She said, 'I don't smoke -- but when I do for a part, I smoke Old Golds.' "

"People like to hear the backstage stories," said Marchi, who often includes in his lectures accounts of how political correctness through the years has forced changes in show tune lyrics.

One of these, he told a recent Elderhostel gathering in Burlingame, was a reworking of the familiar Cold Porter's tune "I Get No Kicks."

In an original recording Marchi has of "Annie Get Your Gun," Ethel Merman is heard proclaiming she got no kicks "from cocaine." Under the censor's pen that became "perfume in Spain," remarked Marchi.